Japanese literature

Japanese literature, the body of written works produced by Japanese authors in Japanese or, in its earliest beginnings, at a time when Japan had no written language, in the Chinese classical language.

Both in quantity and quality, Japanese literature ranks as one of the major literatures of the world, comparable in age, richness, and volume to English literature, though its course of development has been quite dissimilar. The surviving works comprise a literary tradition extending from the 7th century ce to the present; during all this time there was never a “dark age” devoid of literary production. Not only do poetry, the novel, and the drama have long histories in Japan, but some literary genres not so highly esteemed in other countries—including diaries, travel accounts, and books of random thoughts—are also prominent. A considerable body of writing by Japanese in the Chinese classical language, of much greater bulk and importance than comparable Latin writings by Englishmen, testifies to the Japanese literary indebtedness to China. Even the writings entirely in Japanese present an extraordinary variety of styles, which cannot be explained merely in terms of the natural evolution of the language. Some styles were patently influenced by the importance of Chinese vocabulary and syntax, but others developed in response to the internal requirements of the various genres, whether the terseness of haiku (a poem in 17 syllables) or the bombast of the dramatic recitation.

The enduring appeal of Japanese literature

The difficulties of reading Japanese literature can hardly be exaggerated; even a specialist in one period is likely to have trouble deciphering a work from another period or genre. Japanese style has always favoured ambiguity, and the particles of speech necessary for easy comprehension of a statement are often omitted as unnecessary or as fussily precise. Sometimes the only clue to the subject or object of a sentence is the level of politeness in which the words are couched; for example, the verb mesu (meaning “to eat,” “to wear,” “to ride in a carriage,” etc.) designates merely an action performed by a person of quality. In many cases, ready comprehension of a simple sentence depends on a familiarity with the background of a particular period of history. The verb miru, “to see,” had overtones of “to have an affair with” or even “to marry” during the Heian period in the 10th and 11th centuries, when men were generally able to see women only after they had become intimate. The long period of Japanese isolation in the 17th and 18th centuries also tended to make the literature provincial, or intelligible only to persons sharing a common background; the phrase “some smoke rose noisily” (kemuri tachisawagite), for example, was all readers of the late 17th century needed to realize that an author was referring to the Great Fire of 1682 that ravaged the shogunal capital of Edo (the modern city of Tokyo).

Despite the great difficulties arising from such idiosyncrasies of style, Japanese literature of all periods is exceptionally appealing to modern readers, whether read in the original or in translation. Because it is prevailingly subjective and coloured by an emotional rather than intellectual or moralistic tone, its themes have a universal quality almost unaffected by time. To read a diary by a court lady of the 10th century is still a moving experience, because she described with such honesty and intensity her deepest feelings that the modern-day reader forgets the chasm of history and changed social customs separating her world from today’s.

The “pure” Japanese language, untainted and unfertilized by Chinese influence, contained remarkably few words of an abstract nature. Just as English borrowed words such as morality, honesty, justice, and the like from the Continent, the Japanese borrowed these terms from China; but if the Japanese language was lacking in the vocabulary appropriate to a Confucian essay, it could express almost infinite shadings of emotional content. A Japanese poet who was dissatisfied with the limitations imposed by his native language or who wished to describe unemotional subjects—whether the quiet outing of aged gentlemen to a riverside or the poet’s awareness of his insignificance as compared to the grandeur of the universe—naturally turned to writing poetry in Chinese. For the most part, however, Japanese writers, far from feeling dissatisfied with the limitations on expression imposed by their language, were convinced that virtuoso perfection in phrasing and an acute refinement of sentiment were more important to poetry than the voicing of intellectually satisfying concepts.

From the 16th century on, many words that had been excluded from Japanese poetry because of their foreign origins or their humble meanings, following the dictates of the “codes” of poetic diction established in the 10th century, were adopted by the practitioners of the haiku, originally an iconoclastic, popular verse form. These codes of poetic diction, accompanied by a considerable body of criticism, were the creation of an acute literary sensibility, fostered especially by the traditions of the court, and were usually composed by the leading poets or dramatists themselves. These codes exerted an inhibiting effect on new forms of literary composition, but they also helped to preserve a distinctively aristocratic tone.

The Japanese language itself also shaped poetic devices and forms. Japanese lacks a stress accent and meaningful rhymes (all words end in one of five simple vowels), two traditional features of poetry in the West. By contrast, poetry in Japanese is distinguished from prose mainly in that it consists of alternating lines of five and seven syllables; however, if the intensity of emotional expression is low, this distinction alone cannot save a poem from dropping into prose. The difficulty of maintaining a high level of poetic intensity may account for the preference for short verse forms that could be polished with perfectionist care. But however moving a tanka (verse in 31 syllables) is, it clearly cannot fulfill some of the functions of longer poetic forms, and there are no Japanese equivalents to the great longer poems of Western literature, such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Instead, Japanese poets devoted their efforts to perfecting each syllable of their compositions, expanding the content of a tanka by suggestion and allusion, and prizing shadings of tone and diction more than originality or boldness of expression.

The fluid syntax of the prose affected not only style but content as well. Japanese sentences are sometimes of inordinate length, responding to the subjective turnings and twistings of the author’s thought, and smooth transitions from one statement to the next, rather than structural unity, are considered the mark of excellent prose. The longer works accordingly betray at times a lack of overall structure of the kind associated in the West with Greek concepts of literary form but consist instead of episodes linked chronologically or by other associations. The difficulty experienced by Japanese writers in organizing their impressions and perceptions into sustained works may explain the development of the diary and travel account, genres in which successive days or the successive stages of a journey provide a structure for otherwise unrelated descriptions. Japanese literature contains some of the world’s longest novels and plays, but its genius is most strikingly displayed in the shorter works, whether the tanka, the haiku, the Noh plays (also called No, or nō), or the poetic diaries.

Japanese literature absorbed much direct influence from China, but the relationship between the two literatures is complex. Although the Japanese have been criticized (even by some Japanese) for their imitations of Chinese examples, the earliest Japanese novels in fact antedate their Chinese counterparts by centuries, and Japanese theatre developed quite independently. Because the Chinese and Japanese languages are unrelated, Japanese poetry naturally took different forms, although Chinese poetic examples and literary theories were often in the minds of the Japanese poets. Japanese and Korean may be related languages, but Korean literary influence was negligible, though Koreans served an important function in transmitting Chinese literary and philosophical works to Japan. Poetry and prose written in the Korean language were unknown to the Japanese until relatively modern times.

From the 8th to the 19th century Chinese literature enjoyed greater prestige among educated Japanese than their own; but a love for the Japanese classics, especially those composed at the court in the 10th and 11th centuries, gradually spread among the entire people and influenced literary expression in every form, even the songs and tales composed by humble people totally removed from the aristocratic world portrayed in classical literature.

Origins

The first writing of literature in Japanese was occasioned by influence from China. The Japanese were still comparatively primitive and without writing when, in the first four centuries ce, knowledge of Chinese civilization gradually reached them. They rapidly assimilated much of this civilization, and the Japanese scribes adopted Chinese characters as a system of writing, although an alphabet (if one had been available to them) would have been infinitely better suited to the Japanese language. The characters, first devised to represent Chinese monosyllables, could be used only with great ingenuity to represent the agglutinative forms of the Japanese language. The ultimate results were chaotic, giving rise to one of the most complicated systems of writing ever invented. The use of Chinese characters enormously influenced modes of expression and led to an association between literary composition and calligraphy lasting many centuries.

Early writings

The earliest Japanese texts were written in Chinese because no system of transcribing the sounds and grammatical forms of Japanese had been invented. The oldest known inscription, on a sword that dates from about 440 ce, already showed some modification of normal Chinese usage in order to transcribe Japanese names and expressions. The most accurate way of writing Japanese words was by using Chinese characters not for their meanings but for their phonetic values, giving each character a pronunciation approximating that used by the Chinese themselves. In the oldest extant works, the Kojiki (712; The Kojiki: Records of Ancient Matters) and Nihon shoki, or Nihon-gi (720; Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697), more than 120 songs, some dating back to perhaps the 5th century ce, are given in phonetic transcription, doubtless because the Japanese attached great importance to the sounds themselves. In these two works, both officially commissioned “histories” of Japan, many sections were written entirely in Chinese; but parts of the Kojiki were composed in a complicated mixture of languages that made use of the Chinese characters sometimes for their meaning and sometimes for their sound.

The Kojiki, though revered as the most ancient document concerning the myths and history of the Japanese people, was not included in collections of literature until well into the 20th century. The myths in the Kojiki are occasionally beguiling (seeJapanese mythology), but the only truly literary parts of the work are the songs. The early songs lack a fixed metrical form; the lines, consisting of an indeterminate number of syllables, were strung out to irregular lengths, showing no conception of poetic form. Some songs, however, seem to have been reworked—perhaps when the manuscript was transcribed in the 8th century—into what became the classic Japanese verse form, the tanka (short poem), consisting of five lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. Various poetic devices employed in these songs, such as the makura kotoba (“pillow word”), a kind of fixed epithet, remained a feature of later poetry.

Altogether, some 500 primitive songs have been preserved in various collections. Many describe travel, and a fascination with place-names, evident in the loving enumeration of mountains, rivers, and towns with their mantic epithets, was developed to great lengths in the gazetteers (fudoki) compiled at the beginning of the 8th century. These works, of only intermittent literary interest, devote considerable attention to the folk origins of different place-names, as well as to other local legends.

The significance of the Man’yōshū

A magnificent anthology of poetry, the Man’yōshū (compiled after 759; Ten Thousand Leaves), is the single great literary monument of the Nara period (710–784), although it includes poetry written in the preceding century, if not earlier. Most of the 4,500 or so poems are tanka, but the masterpieces of the Man’yōshū are the 260 chōka (“long poems”), ranging up to 150 lines in length and cast in the form of alternating lines in five and seven syllables followed by a concluding line in seven syllables. The amplitude of the chōka permitted the poets to treat themes impossible within the compass of the tanka—whether the death of a wife or child, the glory of the imperial family, the discovery of a gold mine in a remote province, or the hardships of military service.

The greatest of the Man’yōshū poets, Kakinomoto Hitomaro, served as a kind of poet laureate in the late 7th and early 8th centuries, accompanying the sovereigns on their excursions and composing odes of lamentation for deceased members of the imperial family. Modern scholars have suggested that the chōka may have originated as exorcisms of the dead, quieting the ghosts of recently deceased persons by reciting their deeds and promising that they will never be forgotten. Some of Hitomaro’s masterpieces so convincingly describe the glories of princes or princesses he may never have met that they transcend any difference between “public” expressions of grief and his private feelings. Hitomaro’s chōka are unique in Japanese poetry thanks to their superb combination of imagery, syntax, and emotional strength. His tanka also display the evocative qualities often associated with later Japanese poetry.

The chōka often concluded with one or more hanka (“envoys”) that resume central points of the preceding poem. The hanka written by the 8th-century poet Yamabe Akahito are so perfectly conceived as to make the chōka they follow at times seem unnecessary; the concision and evocativeness of these poems, identical in form with the tanka, are close to the ideals of later Japanese poetry. Nevertheless, the supreme works of the Man’yōshū are the chōka of Hitomaro, Ōtomo Tabito, Ōtomo Yakamochi (probably the chief compiler of the anthology), and Yamanoue Okura. The most striking quality of the Man’yōshū is its powerful sincerity of expression. The poets were certainly not artless songsmiths exclaiming in wonder over the beauties of nature, a picture that is often painted of them by sentimental critics, but their emotions were stronger and more directly expressed than in later poetry. The corpse of an unknown traveler, rather than the falling of the cherry blossoms, stirred in Hitomaro an awareness of the uncertainty of human life.

The Man’yōshū is exceptional in the number of poems composed outside the court, whether by frontier guards or persons of humble occupation. Perhaps some of these poems were actually written by courtiers in the guise of commoners, but the use of dialect and familiar imagery contrasts with the strict poetic diction imposed in the 10th century. The diversity of themes and poetic forms also distinguishes the Man’yōshū from the more polished but narrower verse of later times. In Okura’s famous Dialogue on Poverty, for example, two men—one poor and the other destitute—describe their miserable lots, revealing a concern over social conditions that would be absent from the classical tanka. Okura’s visit to China early in the 8th century, as the member of a Japanese embassy, may account for Chinese influence in his poetry. His poems are also prefaced in many instances by passages in Chinese stating the circumstances of the poems or citing Buddhist parallels.

The Man’yōshū was transcribed in an almost perversely complicated system that used Chinese characters arbitrarily, sometimes for meaning and sometimes for sound. The lack of a suitable script probably inhibited literary production in Japanese during the Nara period. The growing importance, however, of Chinese poetry as the mark of literary accomplishment in a courtier may also have interrupted the development of Japanese literature after its first flowering in the Man’yōshū.

Eighteen Man’yōshū poets are represented in the collection Kaifūsō (751), an anthology of poetry in Chinese composed by members of the court. These poems are little more than pastiches of ideas and images borrowed directly from China; the composition of such poetry reflects the enormous prestige of Chinese civilization at this time.

Classical literature: Heian period (794–1185)

The foundation of the city of Heian-kyō (later known as Kyōto) as the capital of Japan marked the beginning of a period of great literary brilliance. The earliest writings of the period, however, were almost all in Chinese because of the continued desire to emulate the culture of the continent. Three imperially sponsored anthologies of Chinese poetry appeared between 814 and 827, and it seemed for a time that writing in Japanese would be relegated to an extremely minor position. The most distinguished writer of Chinese verse, the 9th-century poet Sugawara Michizane, gave a final lustre to this period of Chinese learning by his erudition and poetic gifts, but his refusal to go to China when offered the post of ambassador, on the grounds that China no longer had anything to teach Japan, marked a turning point in the response to Chinese influence.

Poetry

The invention of the kana phonetic syllabary, traditionally attributed to the celebrated 9th-century Shingon priest and Sanskrit scholar Kūkai, enormously facilitated writing in Japanese. Private collections of poetry in kana began to be compiled about 880, and in 905 the Kokinshū (A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern), the first major work of kana literature, was compiled by the poet Ki Tsurayuki and others. This anthology contains 1,111 poems divided into 20 books arranged by topics, including 6 books of seasonal poems, 5 books of love poems, and single books devoted to such subjects as travel, mourning, and congratulations. The two prefaces are clearly indebted to the theories of poetry described by the compilers of such Chinese anthologies as the Shijing (“Classic of Poetry”) and Wen xuan (“Selections of Refined Literature”), but the preferences they express would be shared by most tanka poets for the next 1,000 years. The preface by Tsurayuki, the oldest work of sustained prose in kana, enumerated the circumstances that move men to write poetry; he believed that melancholy, whether aroused by a change in the seasons or by a glimpse of white hairs reflected in a mirror, provided a more congenial mood for writing poetry than the harsher emotions treated in the earlier, pre-kana anthology Man’yōshū. The best tanka in the Kokinshūcaptivate the reader by their perceptivity and tonal beauty, but these flawlessly turned miniatures lack the variety of the Man’yōshū.

Skill in composing tanka became an asset in gaining preference at court; it was also essential to a lover, whose messages to his mistress (who presumably could not read Chinese, still the language employed by men in official documents) often consisted of poems describing his own emotions or begging her favours. In this period the tanka almost completely ousted the chōka, the length of which was indefinite, because the shorter tanka were more suited to the lover’s billet-doux or to competitions on prescribed themes.

For the poets of the Kokinshū and the later court anthologies, originality was less desirable than perfection of language and tone. The critics, far from praising novelty of effects, condemned deviation from the standard poetic diction—which was established by the Kokinshū and consisted of some 2,000 words—and insisted on absolute adherence to the poetic codes first formulated in the 10th century. Although these restrictions saved Japanese poetry from lapses into bad taste or vulgarity, they froze it for centuries in prescribed modes of expression. Only a skilled critic can distinguish a typical tanka of the 10th century from one of the 18th century. The Kokinshū set the precedent for later court anthologies, and a knowledge of its contents was indispensable to all poets as a guide and source of literary allusions.

Love poetry occupies a prominent place in the Kokinshū, but the joys of love are seldom celebrated; instead, the poets write in the melancholy vein prescribed in the preface, describing the uncertainties before a meeting with the beloved, the pain of parting, or the sad realization that an affair has ended. The invariable perfection of diction, unmarred by any indecorous cry from the heart, may sometimes make one doubt the poet’s sincerity. This is not true of the great Kokinshū poets of the 9th century—Ono Komachi, Lady Ise, Ariwara Narihira, and Tsurayuki himself—but even Buddhist priests, who presumably had renounced carnal love, wrote love poetry at the court competitions, and it is hard to detect any difference between such poems and those of actual lovers.

The preface of the Kokinshū lists judgments on the principal poets of the collection. This criticism is unsatisfying to a modern reader because it is so terse and unanalytical, but it nevertheless marks a beginning of Japanese poetic criticism, an art that developed impressively during the course of the Heian period.

Prose

Ki Tsurayuki is celebrated also for his Tosa nikki (936; The Tosa Diary), the account of his homeward journey to Kyōto from the province of Tosa, where he had served as governor. Tsurayuki wrote this diary in Japanese, though men at the time normally kept their diaries in Chinese; that may explain why he pretended that a woman in the governor’s entourage was its author. Events of the journey are interspersed with the poems composed on various occasions. The work is affecting especially because of the repeated, though muted, references to the death of Tsurayuki’s daughter in Tosa.

Tosa nikki is the earliest example of a literary diary. Most of the later Heian diarists who wrote in the Japanese language were court ladies; their writings include some of the supreme masterpieces of the literature. Kagerō nikki (The Gossamer Years) describes the life between 954 and 974 of the second wife of Fujiwara Kaneie, a prominent court official. The first volume, related long after the events, is in the manner of an autobiographical novel; even the author confesses that her remembrances are probably tinged with fiction. The next two volumes approach a true diary, with some entries apparently made on the days indicated. The writer (known only as “the mother of Michitsuna”) describes, with many touches of self-pity, her unhappy life with her husband. She evidently assumed that readers would sympathize, and often this is the case, though her self-centred complaints are not endearing. In one passage, in which she gloats over the death of a rival’s child, her obsession with her own griefs shows to worst advantage. Yet her journal is extraordinarily moving precisely because the author dwells exclusively on universally recognizable emotions and omits the details of court life that must have absorbed the men.

Other diaries of the period include the anecdotalMurasaki Shikibu nikki (“The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu”; Eng. trans. Murasaki Shikibu: Her Diary and Poetic Memoirs), at once an absorbing literary work and a source of information on the court life the author (Murasaki Shikibu) described more romantically in her masterpiece Genji monogatari (c. 1010; The Tale of Genji) and in Izumi Shikibu nikki (The Diary of Izumi Shikibu), which is less a diary than a short story liberally ornamented with poetry.

These “diaries” are closely related in content and form to the uta monogatari (“poem tales”) that emerged as a literary genre later in the 10th century. Ise monogatari (c. 980; Tales of Ise) consists of 143 episodes, each containing one or more poems and an explanation in prose of the circumstances of composition. The brevity and often the ambiguity of the tanka gave rise to a need for such explanations, and, when these explanations became extended or (as in the case of Ise monogatari) were interpreted as biographical information about one poet (Ariwara Narihira), they approached the realm of fiction.

Along with the poem tales, there were works of religious or fanciful inspiration going back to Nihon ryōiki (822; Miraculous Stories from the Japanese Buddhist Tradition), an account of Buddhist miracles in Japan compiled by the priest Kyōkai. Priests probably used these stories, written in Chinese, as a source of sermons with the intent of persuading ordinary Japanese, incapable of reading difficult works of theology, that they must lead virtuous lives if they were not to suffer in hell for present misdeeds. No such didactic intent is noticeable in Taketori monogatari (10th century; Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), a fairy tale about a princess who comes from the Moon to dwell on Earth in the house of a humble bamboo cutter; the various tests she imposes on her suitors, fantastic though they are, are described with humour and realism.

The first lengthy work of fiction in Japanese, Utsubo monogatari (“The Tale of the Hollow Tree”), was apparently written between 970 and 983, although the last chapter may have been written later. This uneven, ill-digested work is of interest chiefly as an amalgam of elements in the poem tales and fairy tales; it contains 986 tanka, and its episodes range from early realism to pure fantasy.

The contrast between this crude work and the sublimeGenji monogatari is overwhelming. The Genji monogatari is the finest work not only of the Heian period but of all Japanese literature and merits being called the first important novel written anywhere in the world. Genji monogatari was called a work of mono no aware (“a sensitivity to things”) by the great 18th-century literary scholar Motoori Norinaga; the hero, Prince Genji, is not remarkable for his martial prowess or his talents as a statesman but as an incomparable lover, sensitive to each of the many women he wins. The story is related in terms of the successive women Genji loves; each of them evokes a different response from this marvelously complex man. The last third of the novel, describing the world after Genji’s death, is much darker in tone, and the principal figures, though still impressive, seem no more than fragmentations of the peerless Genji.

The success of Genji monogatari was immediate. The author of the touching Sarashina nikki (mid-11th century; “Sarashina Diary”; Eng. trans. As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams) describes how as a girl she longed to visit the capital so that she might read the entire work (which had been completed some 10 years earlier). Imitations and derivative works based on Genji monogatari, especially on the last third of it, continued to be written for centuries, inhibiting the fiction composed by the court society.

Makura no sōshi (c. 1000; The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon) is another masterpiece of the Heian period that should be mentioned with Genji monogatari. Japanese critics have often distinguished the aware of Genji monogatari and the okashi of Makura no sōshi. Aware means sensitivity to the tragic implications of a moment or gesture, okashi the comic overtones of perhaps the same moment or gesture. The lover’s departure at dawn evoked many wistful passages in Genji monogatari, but in Makura no sōshiSei Shōnagon noted with unsparing exactness the lover’s fumbling, ineffectual leave-taking and his lady’s irritation. Murasaki Shikibu’s aware can be traced through later literature—sensitivity always marked the writings of any author in the aristocratic tradition—but Sei Shōnagon’s wit belonged to the Heian court alone.

The Heian court society passed its prime by the middle of the 11th century, but it did not collapse for another 100 years. Long after its political power had been usurped by military men, the court retained its prestige as the fountainhead of culture. But in the 12th century, literary works belonging to a quite different tradition began to appear. Konjaku monogatari (early 12th century; “Tales of Now and Then”; partially translated into English as Ages Ago and as Tales of Times Now Past), a massive collection of religious stories and folktales drawn not only from the Japanese countryside but also from Indian and Chinese sources, described elements of society that had never been treated in the court novels. These stories, though crudely written, provide glimpses of how the common people spoke and behaved in an age marked by warfare and new religious movements. The collection of folk songs Ryōjin hishō, compiled in 1179 by the emperor Go-Shirakawa, suggests the vitality of this burgeoning popular culture even as the aristocratic society was being threatened with destruction.

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Over the last 1,400 years, the island nation of Japan has produced some of the world’s greatest literature. The Japanese language is especially suited to the expression of feelings. Even the oldest Japanese writings are remarkable for their ability to touch modern readers.

Rich in sensitivity, quality, and variety, Japanese literature ranks as one of the great literatures of the world. Some of its collections of mythological history have survived for 1,300 years. Yet even the most ancient writings have a universal significance. They contain a sensory appeal that transcends the boundaries of time and cultural differences.

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